September 2016

Video marketing has been increasingly important but often stated as a tool with high investment costs and low ROI. The reality could not be further from the truth. Here’s why:

Video can be a kick boost to your current marketing efforts. It builds a significant amount of trust; it is more engaging than any other platform, and it has a long-tail effect on your SEO and brand recognition compared nothing else. While it has a high investment cost compared to other content marketing options, it has the potential to generate improved ROI if it’s done right. We are here to help you with the groundwork on where to put your videos, how to create them cost-effectively and explain to you the benefits that you should look for when starting a video marketing campaign.

Why and Where You Need to Do Video Marketing

YouTube should be your basecamp platform on video marketing

YouTube’s popularity and ties with Google are not just the only reasons you need to produce videos, especially to YouTube. While Facebook and other social platforms have video capabilities and are getting more and more popular, they are highly relying on their very own “feed”. Once the community stops seeing the feed, the video ranks lower, and there’s little or to no organic growth in views. Meanwhile, YouTube’s recommendation-based system drives internal organic growth on the channel. YouTube is the clear winner on the long-tail effect in video, and their content is easily embeddable to any other platform.

SEO benefits are above anything

If your customers don’t trust you, they won’t buy from you. A well-written review? How about a video demonstration or a how-to-use-it video? Which builds more trust, a live video demo or a long written text? There is no easier and consumable form of content than video. Videos also need more effort to create than any other form of content so it shows enthusiasm and dedication. It is also more shareable than any other form of content.

Video has higher retention and conversions

According to studies, 65% of video viewers watch ¾ of the videos, which cannot be said for those long text articles. Getting a message across to your audience cannot be easier through video. Video can drive higher conversions as well: email campaigns with embedded videos drive higher CTR than any other email campaigns. Video also drives seriously higher conversions in terms of leads than any other platforms.

Creating a video marketing campaign

Using text-to-video tools has never been easier

You don’t have the setup for a full-on video marketing plan in terms of infrastructure and team? Don’t worry, there are solutions for that. Tools like Vidooya or Animoto are helping with the process with text-to-video or simplified video templates. Though originally produced content will always over-perform templates, it is an excellent way to add some new features to your campaign and experiment with video storytelling before you jump on this wagon.

Encourage sharing, add thumbnails and understand the ecosystem

YouTube is simple to understand. When you create call-to-action sections in your content marketing campaigns, do the same in video but now with your own words and play. Just state to users to share your video and subscribe to your channel or put out a single thumbnail to create click-through to your site from the video. Video marketing is super straight-forward. Understand that YouTube is the second largest search engine after Google so naming, tagging and describing your video content via text is super important. Apart from practical options, YouTube also ranks the videos based on how long the videos encourage people to stay on the YouTube platform. The longer users watch your video – the better the search rankings you’ll have. Understand that YouTube has a long-term effect, users can subscribe to your channel. Encouraging users to subscribing to your channel is crucial.

Telling your story in a video

An excellent text-based article has an easy-to-follow structure. So does a video which has a superb storyboard. Sketch it up before you proceed and test the flow of your videos with some draft versions. Create value for your target group and tell your story visually. Experiment with the length of your videos and don’t be afraid to try out new forms of video content ideas live. Also, consider video as a channel where you not just engage with users but also convince them to visit your site.

Measuring your success

Metrics that you need to watch out to determine your video success

Video views

This is the most important metrics you need to track. Views can help you to determine how strong your content and topic is. It also helps you determines your most popular videos and the type of videos well-received by your audience.

Likes and dislikes

This is less important, but it is a good indicator how users receive your content. Obviously, you need to get a more positive vibe for each video you produce.

Watch time

This is not just important because you have a clue how much time users spent on your videos watching, but it also affects your YouTube search rankings.

Engagement metrics

Likes, shares, comments and favourites to your videos. All are critical and provide you with a basic idea on how your videos received by your users.

To recap, video is an engaging content format that may seem daunting to create but will prove rewarding on the long-term. It drives more leads, conversions and gets you more out from SEO than any other content platforms.

Instagram is often viewed as a complimentary social media channel where you need to take your hands on, only after mastering Facebook. While this is, somewhat, true; it is also the reason why most small businesses just skip this channel entirely; labelling this as not important. Also measuring Instagram is harder as it needs tailored tools and attention from your analytics team. These misconceptions couldn’t be further from the truth. Instagram is a fantastic tool for everyone as it can drive sales and generate leads and measuring success on this channel is straight-forward and easy.

Why You Need Instagram Marketing

It’s not just for those who sell visually attractive products.

The common misconception about Instagram marketing is that it is for those who have visually attractive products. Instagram is beneficial for those who sell products that can be attractive on a photo on Instagram as their Instagram channel can serve as a product catalogue or lookbook. But it’s certainly not just for them.

Instagram can showcase your company’s culture. A good photo of a unique desk of your employees, an office picture, pictures about corporate retreats and after-work hours can be engaging, and it can humanise your company. It can attract job prospects as the visual images make your organisation more human, more intimate and more attractive. Instagram can also showcase your company’s good will, charity events, fundraising or just a regular Christmas party. It can show your merchandise, or it can reflect the exact location where your office is based. Any personal touches on Instagram can help your company to distinct itself from other ‘faceless’ and ‘pictureless’ companies.

Instagram is still quiet and engaging

Remember when everyone opened up a Facebook business page and within months, Facebook got flooded with branded content? Well, it is certainly not true for Instagram – at least, not yet. According to Selfstartr, only 36% of marketers use Instagram for campaigns, compared to the 93% of marketers who use Facebook. Instagram is also more engaging than Facebook. Instagram accounts enjoy at least 4% engagement from their total followers according to Forrester. On Facebook, this engagement is less than 0.1%.

Instagram is still a less busy platform compared to other channels so it is easier to get the word out. Your account can grow organically when you are using the right hashtags. If you want to throw in some paid boost, Instagram is fully synched up with Facebook adverts. It costs less to maintain an excellent paid advertising campaign as it has less competition.

How to Create a Content Strategy for Instagram

Create your goals and talking points

Once you have decided on Instagram marketing, you need to set your goals. You can have multiple ones as well but make sure that your Instagram marketing goals are in-line with your business goals. It can be anything from showcasing your products, your company culture, to creating a community around stories, branded infomercial and entertaining content or just pure sales supporting contest-focused channel. Once you have your goal, set your talking points. These points will be your topics that you will stick to and share. It can be anything from product demos, customer stories, meet our team, funny stuff in the office or anything connected to an actual campaign.

Create your Instagram playbook

Once you have everything set, create a playbook for further use to help the content production team to produce awesome content. The playbook will detail the frequency of posting, the content calendar and as Instagram is a visual channel, you also need a style guide that describes the fonts, colour palette, filters and captions you constantly use to make your channel consistent.

Hashtags are one of the primary drives for finding content on Instagram, so you also need to setup your hashtags that you will use on your photos. Make sure you will stick to popular hashtags and a branded hashtag that will reflect your campaign or your brand. TrackMaven research shows that posts with more than 11 hashtags tend to get more engagements. But beware of flooding your posts with hashtags, choose the best ones and most relevant to your content.

How to Measure Success on Instagram

Set the right tools for tracking

Measuring success on Instagram is straight-forward and easy. However, as Instagram activity is not integrated with any well-known tools like Google Analytics, you need to look for tailored tools for Instagram or social media measurement. You can stick to manual tracking or default Instagram metrics provided by Instagram itself, or you can go with tools that help you post and track your Instagram account’s activity. Tools like Buffer, Hootsuite, Sprout, HubSpot can offer you not just great content production and scheduling tools but also a reliable tracking option. For smaller accounts, you can also stick to desktop-based solutions like Webstagram or IconoSquare.

Know what to measure

Instagram is an easy-to-understand tool where you have only a handful of metrics that you need to measure. But it is important to understand the meaning of each metrics.

Number of comments received

Instagram users can comment on posts. The number of posts you receive on your content shows how engaging your content is. Obviously getting likes for your comment is vital, it makes your content stand out and noticed, but real active engagement only happens when a user comments on your post. TrackMaven’s report shows that brands have only around 19 likes per content per 1000 followers but just only 0.5 comments. Commenting, therefore, is the best indicator to decide whether your content is engaging or not.

Engaging hashtags

Using hashtags is the main way to categorise, therefore find new content on Instagram. Check for the most popular and most engaging hashtags that receive high engagement on average and don’t afraid to use them if they are relevant to your content. Popular hashtags can also show you what to post.

If you are a coffee shop and are posting only photos of table napkins, you might want to check that #cafe #coffee #espresso hashtags are more popular, and you can’t go wrong with it.

Number of followers

This works as the most important metric that defines your reach. The higher number of followers you have, the bigger your audience is, and the wider your content reach is. Ideally, the follower numbers are growing day-to-day organically if you use the right techniques. This is a retrospective metric so make sure you look at it by over time; there is no point tracking and reporting it day-by-day. Focus on monthly gains or even wider timeframes to see the growing trend.

Referring traffic from Instagram

On your Instagram profile, you can set URL-s up. Integrate Instagram UTM parameters to your Google Analytics or any other website traffic measurement tool you use to track the referring traffic from Instagram you receive. It is highly recommended to set up this tracking if you are doing a one-off campaign, for example, a promotion or contest through Instagram.

On reporting, we would advise reporting the Instagram performance monthly to see the trends in your activities.

Measuring Your Customers’ Attention, Actions and Approval

You have created your content marketing plan, and you have published all your content, but you don’t know how to evaluate your success. In some cases, your KPIs might help you, but mostly they only show the end game of your content marketing, not the actual performance of your content. But how do evaluate your content marketing? There are three factors you need to consider measuring: attention, action and approval. Each factor gives you a decent outlook on your performance but combines them into one report; you will have an idea on how your content marketing generates leads for your campaign.

Know where your customers’ focus are and target them better

The hard and the soft figures: views and time

Getting attention is the most difficult part of any advertising campaign regardless of the platform for a company. With too much interfering noise on the internet, it is even harder if not impossible to gain attention. Also distinguishing ourselves from others is harder than ever. But you’ve finally managed to get that attention: customers are visiting your site. How do you measure their attention? To measure attention, you have two options: a hard and a soft figure.

The hard figure is your views. The basic user segmentations and site performance metrics are good indicators for attention measurement: page views, unique views, returning visits. On the bottom line: if your content performs well on the top level key figures, you have their attention. But that is just a simple yes or no. How do you evaluate further?

Soft figures can be helpful here. By measuring time spent on your site can get you an idea of how much attention is paid to your content. If you had minor flows of users who are bouncing off your site – bounce rate is also a significant indicator – then you can say: your content certainly raised some eyebrows but proved to be irrelevant in a matter of seconds. Time spent on site is the best indicator you can get to measure your attention meter.

The one-hit wonders and the real cult leaders

Depends on what you want, but there are two options you can have. Either you have a massive attention with a short timeframe or a modest but loyal community. When you see massive site performance figures but low time on site and high bounce rate then you are a one-off celebrity on the net who will disappear with the first new wave. If you have a more modest figure but high time on site and low bounce rate, then your community is loyal and really pays attention to you. Therefore, performance metrics for a site are a matter of context and correlations.

Let your customers interact with your products and know more on what they like

Setting your goals

To define your actions; first, you need to set your goals. Every campaign is different, and your goals should reflect your campaign’s outcomes. Engagement metrics, like likes, shares, comments are different, however, in some cases, your campaign’s goal can be a high engagement metric. Therefore, the actions will be your engagements: the number of likes, comments, shares and pins. But most of the campaign goals are more solid: getting a purchase (sale) or getting a signup (lead). You can set up campaign goals and funnels in your metrics system so, in the end, you will have a clear idea of how your content marketing campaign performs regarding actions. The number of sign ups, purchases, and registrations are solid figures.

Is interactivity an action?

It certainly is. The more options you have for users to interact, the more popular your site will be. There are hard figures for action-measurements: signups, purchases, registrations. But some customers want to make a purchase, subscribe or register only after fiddling around your site. So what are the soft figures for actions? Frequency, scroll depths, recirculation of content and browsing around your FAQ and other static content are also actions. They show that users are very interested in your content, but they just don’t feel they can make a final action. Analysing the soft figures for action can help you to get an overall picture of how the process goes on your site and where users are bouncing off or making a hard action. Implementing events to your site will also get you more insights: when do they click certain buttons or read more sections on your site?

This week we will show you how to evaluate your content marketing performance. Please join our weekly Q&A where we answer all of your questions.

Get your customers’ approval badge and generate more leads

I share this = I approve this

If you ask a content marketer on how content marketing performance can be measured in most cases, the first thing that should come to mind would be “engagement”. Shares, likes, comments, pins, follows and other social media engagement metrics. We also do believe these metrics are significant to measure your content performance but from an outcome perspective, this is the least important concerning your business.

When users engage with content, they meant to say “we approve this content.” Approval is critical as without approval; there’s no credibility.

The engagement food chain

Some metrics can measure engagement. But which one is more important than the others? It all depends on the depth of engagement. How much the users want to approve that content, what would be the depth of their connection to that content? Hitting a like, a favourite, a pin is easy. Hitting follow or comment requires more, however. Sharing or retweeting something; however, that means that particular user is truly behind that content, and the approval rating is the highest possible. Sharing other users’ content on your channels is the best thing any brand or company can want.

Evaluating your content marketing: The big picture

We hope that we have helped to deliver the full big picture on how to evaluate content marketing performance. Engagement metrics are not enough; you also need to measure the outcomes of your content and the rate of attention generated by your content. From there, you can paint the full user journey to your content marketing and evaluate the process, gather some insights on each stage and in the end: perform better.

The year 2016 is almost up with just 3 months more to go. Over the past couple of years, we’ve experimented around and tried different ways to deliver valuable content to our readers.

We’ve come up with a lot of strategies to ensure that our readers are delivered helpful and informative content. With that said, we’ve rounded up some of our popular topics this year. Let’s take a step back and revisit them:

Video content has been increasingly popular and made even more so by social networking platforms due to its ability to engage the audience. If you’re still not convinced or still second-guessing whether to add videos to your content arsenal, we’ve highlighted the reasons for you to think it through with this article.

If you’re keen on connecting to a continuously evolving and diverse market, mobile is the way to go. Check out the emerging trends in mobile advertising and take advantage of them in your next marketing campaign.

Earlier, we discussed the obvious signs that you need to redesign your website and how to determine the issues that need to be fixed while redesigning your website. The next step is to look into new goals for the updated site and how to address these goals.

In this article, we will discuss some common goals for a website redesign and how to address them.

Here are some of the general goals that may come to mind during a site update:

1. You want to improve your website traffic

By analysing your website traffic, you will have a fair understanding of your traffic sources enabling you to identify which channels to focus your marketing efforts. Optimising your website for search engines will also be effective if you properly analyse the data from your analytics reports.

2. You want to improve content on your site

With digital analytics, which pages have high exit rates and which of your keywords deliver the highest traffic. You can apply the data and analysis to align with your new website design. Analysing your traffic sources can help you create your copy to match the channels where you get the most visitors for a boost in engagement.

3. You want to improve user experience and conversion

With analytics, you can use the data to identify which User Experience element is costing you your website traffic and conversions. Slow loading pages and 404 errors are some of the UX issues you can identify with analytics.

Tracking your goals and funnels and event tracking using Google Analytics will help you determine which parts of your website worked best for your conversion goals which you can retain in your new website design.

Remember that the goals mentioned above are just a few of many possible goals and that A/B testing before implementation is always recommended to achieve your website goals.

Are you interested in discussing new possible goals for a website redesign? Feel free to connect with us.